When unfriendly microbes enter the intestinal cells of an animal, its immune system sends out special molecules to intercept and bind to the microbes, preventing their further growth by activating specific pathways. The overall goal of my research program is to identify these molecules and gain an understanding of their role in immunity. Since the region of DNA coding in genes of simpler animals is often found conserved in higher level organisms, valuable insights can be gained from their comparison. The strategy of identifying evolutionary conservation in genetic information between organisms is being used to assess the importance of the molecules and pathway components discovered for a specific model organism such as C. elegans in human or mice.
The explosion of high-throughput data in Molecular Biology is providing multiple omics studies using technologies on the same samples this has offered to my laboratory novel opportunities for enhancing our knowledge of immunity. We are developing novel approaches to integrate and interpret diverse omics data in a way that provides biological insights. Our goal is to develop bioinformatics workflows and experimental strategies to follow up on hypotheses generated by these large-scale data analyses. Together, these bioinformatics and experimental tools can address novel questions and identify biological mechanisms in more efficient and robust way in this exciting area of immunity and OMICS data integration and analysis and furthermore translate this basic research into health.
Our current project covers the areas of: